http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
OAKLAND mayor Jerry Brown is a big booster of the city's "Operation Beat Feet" program that
allows the city to seize cars driven by those who solicit prostitutes or try to buy drugs on
the street. Said Dao Mayor, "We're going to keep it going as long as we have to, until these
neighborhoods are safe."

I'm all for safe Oakland neighborhoods too, but not if it means punishing innocent people,
and not if it means the punishment far exceeds the crime.

The program was started with good intentions. Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Russ
Giuntini said he first suggested such a program to the city because predominantly black
flatland neighborhoods were beset with white out-of-towners looking for drugs. It didn't seem
fair.

"To me, the ultimate question is, who's got the choice?" he explained. "Is it the person
who's on a low- or fixed-income renting or owning a home in the flatlands, or is it the
person who, on the way home decides, 'I'm going to buy some rock cocaine or look for a
prostitute.'"

That's the image the forfeiture folk like to leave you with: rich swell from Tiburon loses
his luxury car after he's caught trolling Oakland for drugs or demeaning sex.

City documents, however, don't support that stereotype. For one thing, the person who loses
the car probably wasn't even in it. Only about 150 of the 351 vehicles seized were registered
to the suspect, according to a KTVU-Chronicle review.

Seizure of property from people who didn't do anything is "constitutional," Giuntini noted.
Too true. In an outrageous 1996 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the seizure of a 1977
Pontiac co-owned by the wife of a man who solicited a prostitute in Detroit. As if the news
about her husband's hobby wasn't bad enough, Tina Bennis had to bundle up all four of her
children to walk the two eldest to school each morning because authorities had seized the
family's first-ever second car. Shame on the Big Bench for supporting laws that punish
innocent people.

Despite the rhetoric, most of the cars seized in Oakland fit the Bennis Pontiac profile.

KTVU Producer Roland De Wolk found that the average value of cars seized was $1,210 which,
Mill Valley attorney Brenda Grantland noted, means that too often it is cheaper to buy back
your clunker -- or allow the city to auction it off and buy another -- than it is to defend
yourself.

Grantland defended a man whose $5,000 truck was seized after he tried to buy $20 worth of
marijuana. She successfully argued that because the criminal fine for trying to buy small
amounts of marijuana is $50, the forfeiture violated the Eighth Amendment's excessive fines
clause. One problem, she noted: "It cost us more than the value of the truck to litigate the
case."

(Plus, her client still had to pay $2,500 to Oakland to get back his truck, when the fine is
supposed to be $50.)

Oakland Deputy City Attorney Pelayo Llamas Jr. said the Grantland case proved "a perfect
example of someone taking advantage of their due process rights."
Due process rights? Ha. Tell that to a man who has to pay a fine 500 times the fine demanded
of other violators. Tell that to the wife of a guy who got caught doing what he shouldn't be
doing -- when she has to give up her car because she couldn't find a lawyer who would
represent her for less than her clunker is
worth.

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